It's a wonderful 'Evening'

Thursday

Every new movie is faced with a challenge: to make back the money spent on making it — and hopefully turn a profit. The film adaptation of “Evening,” based on the 1998 novel by Boston native Susan Minot, has all kinds of additional challenges attached.

First, there’s that book — an enormously popular, meticulously detailed account of an older blue-blood woman who, during a visit from her two daughters to her deathbed, flows in and out of memories back to her younger days, recalling a handsome man whom she still regrets she let get away. In fact, the book is all about regrets, as well as mistakes. It’s brimming with characters, present and past, all of whom are much loved by the numerous fans who made it a best seller. To turn it into an acceptable film would be a formidable task, one that would likely disappoint many readers.

In fact, Minot tried for years to get it right, tackling, and finally giving up on, the screenplay. Enter novelist Michael Cunningham, who won the 1999 Pulitzer Prize for fiction for his novel “The Hours.”

“When they called me and asked me if I’d consider taking a crack at the novel, the first thing I did was call Susan and say, ‘I love your book; working together we will have to make huge changes in order for it to work as a movie. If that’s a problem for you, tell me right now, and I won’t do it,’ ” Cunningham says. “But to her credit, she said, ‘Well, no, that’s why they called you.’ ”

Cunningham knew that the main problem was, as he puts it, “simple population control.” He started paring some characters down, even cutting out some of them. Oddly, in one case — the drunken, tragic Buddy — the character was given more presence.

“I’m a huge fan of Susan’s,” Cunningham says. “At first I was more than a little reluctant because I suspect it’s easier to adapt a not very good novel for the movies — ‘The Godfather’ being a classic example.”

He laughs and adds, “Forgive me, spirit of Mario Puzo. But it was a kind of pulpy book — that made a great movie.”

Cunningham’s take on Minot’s elegant novel is that it’s “a story of a woman who, in her old age, finds herself looking back at her life, and finding it full of mistakes and wrong turns, then coming to understand that there were no mistakes, there were no wrong turns. This is your life, and it was a great gift, even though at the time, it didn’t always feel that way.”

He stops to think about that for a moment, and adds, “As I’ve grown into adulthood, I’ve gotten progressively more interested in the idea that ‘Hey, this is your life. Love this, 'cause it’s what you’ve got.’ ”

But aside from nailing the book with a strong, slimmed-down film adaptation, the marketing folks also need to be concerned that “Evening” is going to be labeled as a chick flick, one that movie-going, ticket-buying men will either have to be dragged to or just won’t see.

Interestingly, it’s a man who steps up to bat for the film.

“I take issue with the chick flick bit,” says British actor Hugh Dancy, who plays Buddy. “I think there are two extremes of movies — there’s the guy’s film where everything gets reconciled with explosives, and then there’s the other end of the extreme, where everything is kind of very happy and romantic, and that’s what I kind of think of as a chick flick. But I don’t see this movie in that framework at all. I think the themes are pretty universal.”

The dying woman, Ann, is played by Vanessa Redgrave. One of her daughters, Nina, is played by Toni Collette. In an inspired piece of casting, the other daughter, Constance, is played by Redgrave’s daughter Natasha Richardson, who needed a bit of convincing to take the part.

“At first I was concerned that this was going to be a film with overly sentimental, weeping, indulgent females,” Richardson says candidly. “But now I don’t think it is. There are so many themes, so many things that will resonate with different people. There are mother-daughter relationships, there are sisters; most importantly there's that sense of lost love, lost opportunity. I just think there’s a beautiful, evocative, romantic energy in the film.”

The flashback sequences, that return to 50 years earlier, feature the young Ann, as played by Claire Danes, who’s convinced that the film will prove entertaining and thought-provoking for a wide audience.

“I think everyone that sees this can relate to something, there are so many storylines,” she says. "I like to think that there are men out there that aren’t aching to see ‘Die Hard 54.’ It’s a sophisticated, complex, sensitive movie. It’s also really relatable and accessible.”

The familial casting gets even better. In a cameo late in the film, Ann’s best friend Lila is played by Meryl Streep. In the flashbacks, Lila is played by Streep’s daughter Mamie Gummer.

Gummer feels that the story “poses a lot of questions, and it doesn’t necessarily provide answers. It’s about life, good or bad, and being sort of content or at least having the hope of being happy at the end of the day.”

But it’s Dancy who seems most affected by the unsentimental power of the film.

“I recognized the truth that we all need to define ourselves,” he explains. “I imagine that certain people, as they get older, need to look back and feel there’s something palpable and distinct, that they were. We do that by placing flags in certain events — mistakes or great moments or decisions we made. I agree with the movie that our mistakes are usually not our mistakes, that ultimately it’s the things that we don’t do that we maybe ought to regret. I think the movie’s universal because it examines that need for meaning that we all have. You know, what’s it all mean? It’s a big question.”

“Evening” opens on June 29.

Ed Symkus can be reached at esymkus@cnc.com.

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